In 1835, Georg Büchner, living in exile in Strasbourg, took an interest in the three weeks poet and playwright Jakob Lenz spent at the Ban de la Roche in 1777, staying with pastor Oberlin. Using this twenty-one-day parenthesis in the heart of the Vosges as a springboard, he tried to give voice to the agonies of a writer struggling with existential questions. In that village, and more precisely within the community of believers surrounding the pastor, Lenz feels welcome but slowly realises that the only answer offered to his anxieties is a faith he already rejected as a young man. If salvation exists, it cannot be this one... By adapting this very intense story and adding excerpts from plays and dramas and notes taken by pastor Oberlin himself, Cornelia Rainer draws the portrait of a suffering man unable to find peace and invites us to discover the work of a writer all too often overshadowed by his mentor Goethe. Staying as close as possible to Büchner's writing, with its alternating harmonies and disharmonies, the Austrian director has imagined a spectacular scenography, a musical theatre in which the modern score, with its percussion instruments, clashes with the religious songs Jakob Lenz may have heard during his exile in the Vosges. From the weight of religion to the power of the universe, from the violence of the elements to the hypersensitivity of the soul... Lenz opens the door to Romanticism.
In December 1835, George Büchner started a novella he would never finish, Lenz, in which he reimagined the time the poet and playwright Jakob Lenz spent with pastor Oberlin. An exile, just like his model, Büchner had to flee Hesse because of his political writings, not long after writing his first play, Danton's Death. While studying to become a doctor, he wrote Leonce and Lena in 1836, then Woyzeck, his final play, which also remains unfinished. He died on 19 February 1837 in Zurich, aged 23, of typhus.
Distribution
Adaptation and direction Cornelia Rainer
Stage design and costumes Aurel Lenfert
Music Sophie Hunger, Christian Prader, Julian Sartorius
Dramaturgy Sibylle Dudek
Lights Bernhard Schmidhuber
Assistant director Claire Tudela
With Jele Brückner, Jakob Egger, Noah Fida, alternating with Merlin Miglinci, Cornelia Köndgen, Markus Meyer, Heinz Trixner and the musician Julian Sartorius
Production
Production Theater Montagnes Russes
Co-production Young Directors Project, festival of Salzbourg
With the support of Federal Chancellery of Austria for Art and Culture, Cultural Austria Forum of Paris and HS-Art Service Austria